Because we’re so sneaky and loving, we decided to surprise Andy’s mother with a visit this morning. We’d actually planned it for months, but told Karen we’d be coming for Christmas. best.surprise.ever. Happy surprise, Mama Morse!!

Wrangell, we are in you. Let’s drink salmon vodka and go fishing. I can be reached on the deck of the Stik, where I’ll be practicing my Bangla while drinking a coffee in the hazy sunshine.

Do you see those cuties? Those are our darling friends Rhett and Maggie who got married last night on the majestic Wheel of Love (otherwise known as Seattle’s Great Wheel) in what was possible the most adorable wedding I’ve ever attended. The sun was shining, the humidity was low, and the air temperature was just right for a walk in the sunshine to dinner after greeting our friends with some bubbles to celebrate their union.

Andy met Rhett several years ago working at Apple before Rhett decided he’d had enough of Seattle and headed home to Florida. When he came home a a year and a half ago he brought Maggie and their baby Una with them. I was pregnant with Ró at the time and when Andy kept suggesting that Maggie and I should become gal pals I brushed him off as just trying to get more bromance time with Rhett. I should have listened because Maggie is amazing and I wish that we’d become friends sooner. She’s sweet and silly, clever and passionate, relaxed and full of sage-like advice. I’m grateful for our chats and her kindness. I mean, really just look at this blissful bride. Who wouldn’t want to be friends with someone like her?

Bride and pony show

After the ceremony (which can be watched online here) we all walked over to Local 360 for some local, sustainable glutenfree dinner. It was the golden hour, so naturally we all wanted to take a million pictures of the blessed couple and sweet Miss Una.

Obligatory Pike Place Market shot

Lovely Una

Ró was a big fan of the bubbles-at-weddings concept

My two best guys

When we arrived our table wasn’t quite ready, so the toddlers needed some wrangling. Luckily there was a giant specials board which gave Ró the opportunity to show off his letters. He has letter “O” down and almost total success with “I” and “R.” We’ve been working on the alphabet (mostly sans the silly song) and he seems interested in the power of writing. When we talked about how his name (Ró) is made up of letters that he knows it was an exciting moment for him.

Gratuitous pictures of how cute my baby is: check

Ró has learned a few letters and uses every opportunity to point out “O” “I” and “R”

Dinosaurs at the table

And then there was delicious glutenfree, dairy free cake. So, so much cake.

Yeah, I know. I said I’d write more and that I’d write regularly, but I obviously didn’t. The truth of the situation was this: I didn’t have anything interesting beyond my adorable child happening in my life and then I went back to school and had tons of cool things happening, but no time to write about them. Now It’s summer and I have more time (temporarily), so here it is: an update. How exciting!

Rónán is almost 2 and does so many awesome things that I’m not even going to try to cover them all. He runs, he climbs, he loves dinosaurs and airplanes, he jumps, he signs, he talks, he internets. It’s actually kind of ridiculous how amazing he is. Andy and I are incredibly lucky to have such a healthy, happy, clever, and caring boy in our lives. He starts preschool across from the University in the fall when my classes resume and it doesn’t seem possible that my little guy is already so old that he’s going to anything that could even remotely be called “school.” Where is the time going? The Colin Firth Pride & Prejudice is almost 20 years old and Pulp Fiction is now a “cult classic” for crying out loud!

Just look at this sweet little pro-choice baby. He’s such a budding activist!

Yo, Dog, I heard you like dinosaurs, so I got you some dinosaurs so you could hold dinosaurs while you watch Dinosaur Train

I’ve loved being in school again. I honestly had no idea that I missed formal education this much until I returned to it and started kicking academic ass on a daily basis. Returning to UW has also helped me to hone what I want to do with my life: rather than pursue a career as a midwife here in the United States, (Andy and) I have decided that it makes the most sense for me to get an MPH and work toward a position with an NGO helping to empower women and reduce maternal mortality in South Asia (like the UNFPA). To accomplish this lofty (and thrilling!) goal will take a lot of work, but I’m not really afraid of that. I’m in the early stages of learning Bangla (Bengali-the language of West Bengal and Bangladesh) and am going to Asia for a networking and research trip in 3 weeks. Seriously, I’m so excited just thinking about this that I don’t even know what to do with myself. Ideally, I’ll go again next summer to do midwifery internships in both Bangladesh and Indonesia (at least 1 is semi-fixed) to research the training and scopes of practice of those two nations. It’ll be tightly squeezed between can-not-miss-weddings in June and August, but will be so incredible to experience.

Andy is also doing exciting things. He’s starting classes at Seattle Central to begin the process of completing his degree, which is a wonderful, exciting prospect for him and our family. He’s worked really hard to support our family since Ró was born and I left my job, encouraging me (mostly) to become a doula, encapsulate placentas, study midwifery, and to return to formal education. Being a student and a parent is hard, but I’m very, very fortunate to have a parenting partner to help me.

It’s very late and I drove back from Portland today after celebrating my best friend Valerie’s birthday this weekend, so I can’t come up with anything coherent to say just now, so enjoy some cute pictures of my baby from the last few months. He just gets cuter every day!

Sweet sleepy Ró

And here we have a cute baby with a clutch of theropod eggs. Your argument is invalid.

I had a busy summer of births (yay!) which unfortunately meant that we were unable to make our annual 4th of July Wrangell pilgrimage. I was super bummed about it and we decided that we’d just go for Christmas, but then my amazing father-in-law won an extra ticket in a golf tournament and we cashed out some airmiles to go in September. Wrangell is absolutely fantastic and completely breathtaking at every turn. Like here:

Petroglyph Beach [/caption]

There’s no filter on that; it’s just what Wrangell looks like.

The flight up is always hard because the only one leaves at 07:00, so we had to leave home at 04:00 to be there be 05:00. I was so scared that Ró would have a bad time on the plane, but he’s a dream to travel in the air with, truth be told. No crying at all! He wasn’t too happy getting up at 03:00, but who is?

Note: I just discovered this post almost a year after I started it and I’m now so homesick for Wrangell-even though I’ve never actually lived there; how ridiculous is that? Also, look how tiny and adorable Ró was!

Lest you should ever have this problem, I do not advise that you leave home for almost two weeks before your kid’s first birthday, then change the party date to a week later even though it’s the day before you have a 05:00 flight to Alaska because that for some reason seems like it will be easier. I’ll save you the trouble: it isn’t.

Luckily, we didn’t want to do anything complicated anyway, so it all worked out. It was a beautiful day and we celebrated Ró’s birthday with friends at the beach, which was such a treat.

My kid is ONE. A whole, entire year old! How did that even happen? Where does the time go? He was a newborn just last week and now he’s refusing to walk more than 5 steps unless I distract him with grapes. Time needs to just slow back down to its snail’s pace from when I was in high school. I just want to hold on so tightly to Ró and never let him slip away. Is that really so much to ask?

A Whole Year!

New Things

Movement- Ró is a kid on a mission… to trick Mama into thinking he doesn’t know how to crawl. He’ll walk if he has something in his hand or isn’t paying attention to what he’s doing, but he’s back on his bum crawling as soon as he realises what he’s done. He’s lickity split crawling, but I can hardly wait for him to take off on two legs. Dancing is a whole different story, though, and Ró loves to boogy down. His favourite tunes are the ones he plays on his vast collection of tiny instruments. You’d never guess that he comes from such a musical family or anything! We listen to a lot of NPR during the day, but I’m trying to play more music since he loves it so darn much.

Talking- We’ve been signing with Ró since the day he was born, so he’s got the important ones down, but he also has quite the verbal vocabulary. I hadn’t been counting them until his pedi asked at his 12 month check up about how many he says, but he’s super far ahead of what’s expected at his age. Right now he says between 15 and 20 words (some more often than others), but what’s expected is only 1-2. I credit all the in depth conversations I have with him about feminism and our hours reading. I’m one proud mama!

Books- This kid loves them. All the time. It doesn’t even matter if someone isn’t reading them to him, he crawls right over and takes care of business himself. At a friend’s birthday party he was kind enough to take all his buddy’s new books and read them for him, just to make sure they were good enough.

Don’t get between my kid and Llama Llama Red Pajama

Books, he haz dem

Sleep- We’re cutting molars right now and are still adjusting to life back home, so he’s been a little more restless, but I’ve always been lucky in the night-sleeping department. Naps, however, are a totally different story…

Games- Itsy Bitsy Spider, the ASL alphabet, and peekaboo are big right now-I mean BIG. Ró has also learned to boof tummies; by the time he finishes his face and my tummy are both covered in spit and we’re both in stitches laughing. My heart melts. At the playground he’s able to climb all the way up the toys himself, but loves it when I hold his arms to help him slide down then swing him back up again. My little lad has spent hours giggling away, signing “more” eagerly after each go down the slide.